


Brewing Storm

by 13thSyndicate



Series: Memories Scattered Upon The Beach Like Shells [1]
Category: Final Fantasy X
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - The Little Mermaid, Angst, Drabble, Drama, F/M, Fluff, mer!Tidus, mermaid, scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-19
Updated: 2014-10-19
Packaged: 2018-02-21 18:32:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2478260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13thSyndicate/pseuds/13thSyndicate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yuna... I have to go."</p><p>With those words, their fate was sealed - but he couldn't build a trusting relationship on lies, and even if he wanted to, his people, his <i>real</i> people, needed his help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brewing Storm

“Yuna... I have to go.”

The sea was stormy in the west, though the winds and rains didn’t touch the beach. It was a surreal feeling, standing on the sunny shore and watching the clouds roil the ocean less than an hour’s quick swim away. The sinking, twisting feeling settled itself in his gut as the full implications of what he was about to do hit him. He would never be able to return here, or to her side, again.

“Why? What do you mean?”

He turned back towards her as he felt her grip his hand tighter, and gazed into her eyes, dual-colored, both colors of the sea. He felt a lump form in his throat, making him swallow. It was suddenly hard to breathe the harsh, salty air, to force the words off his tongue, not because of any witch’s curse but because of the profound feeling of his heart, splitting in two.

“They need me, Yuna,” he said simply. He opened his mouth to speak again, to say the fateful words, but their other companion seemed to realize what he was doing. Her green eyes begged him as she grabbed his sleeve and pulled, as if she could physically restrain him.

“Tidus, don’t!” she said. “You... you... you can’t really want to... you know what she said!”

“What who said?” Yuna asked, confused, gripping his hand tightly.  
  
“Rikku,” he said, “I don’t have a choice. Okay? I don’t have a choice. Look at that.” He pointed out to the storm on the bay, waving a hand frantically to indicate the dissonance between the land’s serenity and the sea’s turmoil.

“It’s not your problem,” she pleaded. “You’ll be giving up everything!”

“Since when is it not my problem?” he yelled. “Since when is any of that not my problem? Our people need me, Rikku, and it’s all my fault!”

He winced as Yuna’s eyes widened in the corner of his vision. They flicked to his bare feet and then to the ocean, and his heart sank further as the prickle of the witch’s magic in the air warned him that she was too close to the truth.

“No,” she whispered, “it... it can’t be.”

“Tidus...!” Rikku begged. “Please. Please, don’t... don’t throw it all away, everything you’ve worked for. The person you loved. You can’t...!”

His throat tightened, but he swallowed again and turned away from the pleading blonde, freeing his arm so he could grasp Yuna’s hands in his, his ocean-blue eyes misting up with tears he couldn’t bring himself to shed.

“I can’t build a relationship based on a lie,” he said, to both of them. “I... I realize that now. And I can’t just let her do what she wants to... to my people. To your people. She was in league with that Seymour creep the whole time, plotting to take over. She wants to see both kingdoms destroyed.”

He squeezed her hands, then backed away gently. With every word he spoke, the magic burned his throat, and prickled in the air.

“Yuna, I can’t stay. I can’t pretend to be someone, something, I’m not anymore, just to get you to like me. The only way to undo what I’ve done is to... to give everything up that I’ve worked for, but, if it’s meant to be, it’ll happen, right?” He put on a brave face. His foot splashed into the water. He watched her move forward, and he clenched his fists. “I... I’m not who you think I am.”

He looked back at the water, and something came into his eyes, something wistful and longing. When he turned them back to Yuna, that longing ache was still there. The love he felt for the sea and the longing he felt for her combined in them, twisting, aching, pulling at each other until it felt like his heart would be torn asunder by their warring.

“I’m not like you, Yuna.”

“No, no. Please. Please, don’t say it.” It was her turn to beg. She didn’t want to let him go, and she was realizing it, too - if he spoke the deadly truth that hung between them, she would lose him forever.

“Yuna, listen to me. You have to hear this. You have to understand.” He put his hands on his hips, glaring at her stubbornly. “I... I care about you, more than I could ever really say. But I have to go. Because I have to help my people.” Fire erupted in his throat with every word he spoke, burning and burning, but he had to push through the pain. “The people of the sea.” His eyes slipped closed, and he wiggled his toes in the sand, to savor the feeling for one last time as he said the final four words that would seal his fate.

“Yuna... I’m a mer.”

He felt the sea-witch’s magic explode around him, like a sucker-punch to the gut that forced him down to his knees, knocking the wind out of him as he clutched his arms around himself. Swirling storm winds and a wave of water and light caught at his legs, merging them back together and leaving a pattern of scales in their wake. His own sleek fins re-emerged, and he grit his teeth in pain as gill slits cut their way back across his neck, one of the last changes remaining before he was truly himself again. The steps he’d taken to comfort Yuna had taken him away from the sea, and he felt helpless as he always had on land, his powerful tail making him nothing less than a true athlete in the water, but useless for navigating the shore.

“Tidus!” Yuna cried, and threw herself to the ground next to him, not seeming to care if she ruined her skirt, the intricate patterns woven into her clothing. Rikku was soon after her, kneeling on his other side as Yuna drew him up into her lap as he tried to control his breathing, recovering from the painful change. He was still wearing the jacket she’d given him, but the rest of his clothes had disappeared with no trace to be found, not made to fit a merman’s sleek body.

“Why?” she asked quietly, running her hand through his hair like she had done that one magical night, that night when they had sat and gazed at the stars and each realized how horribly in love they were with the other - the night he realized she would always put her duty before him, and that he would follow her until his time ran out anyway.

He deliberately misinterpreted her question, not ready to deal with the hurt inside him yet.

“It was the witch’s curse. If you ever found out that I was a merman, I’d immediately go back to the way I used to be. I’d stop being human, and my deal with the witch would be... well.... forfeit.”

He knew, though, that that wasn’t the answer she wanted. Her other hand was hesitant as she laid it across his fine scales, hesitant to touch that part of him that made him a mer, that made him different from her. It had to be alien to her, as alien to her as human skin had once felt to him, but her fingers barely twitched, no flinch as two worlds finally met.

“Two reasons,” he said with a sigh, closing his eyes and losing himself in her touch, in the strange feeling of her smooth skin against his scales, basking in it until he regained his strength. “Because... I needed to stop the witch. When the sea kingdom falls, she’ll take this one as well, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.” He took a deep breath and remembered how difficult that was, how much he depended on his gills. “The other reason was... I couldn’t keep lying to you, Yuna, just to make you like me. I had to... to be myself. I can’t hide who I am forever, and if I had to... I don’t know that I could be happy, and you deserve better than that.”

He could feel his strength coming back to him now, his tail once again feeling natural to him, the power in it filling him with easy confidence. He forced himself to sit up, though Yuna seemed loathe to let him go. He knew that if he lingered any moment, the sea witch would sense him, and everything would be for nothing.

“I have to hurry,” he told her, gazing into her eyes, and she nodded, reluctantly, because she understood the need for sacrifice. Gathering himself, he pulled himself closer to the sea, ready to make a desperate push for the water, when he felt Rikku’s hands lifting him - she was deceptively strong for her small size as she partially slung him over her shoulder.

“Who said friends can’t help friends?” she asked, before dragging him further. He could feel water splash around his tail fin, and Rikku knelt in the surf, letting him go. With one last look back toward the shore, he gave a strong kick, letting him out of the shallows and into deeper water.

He’d nearly forgotten this feeling, the graceful, easy feeling of a mer in their home element, surrounded by water. As he plunged deeper and he felt his gills fill with water, he felt a surge of bittersweet delight - he was home, where he was born to belong, once again. Splashing behind him told him that someone was running, out into the sea, and he turned to look to see Yuna, wading in behind him, stumbling, tripping, but still somehow avoiding falling. When she was at her waist, Rikku held her back, but she pulled her arm free of the younger girl’s grasp.

“Tidus!” she called, and her voice was choked with the same lump that had not yet left his own. “Tidus...!”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, but he caught a faint whisper of hers on the breeze.

“I love you,” she had said. And then she raised her fingers to her lips and let out  a piercing dolphin whistle, just as he had taught her, over two months ago when it seemed like they had all the time in the world.

Both heartened and heartsick, he dove.

The witch wouldn’t have his uncle’s kingdom, if he had to sell his soul a second time. Yuna and the people she loved so much would be safe from the wrath of the sea.

**Author's Note:**

> _A little scene from a potential TLM-esque thing involving Tidus and Yuna; I'm planning on writing more scenes, but they'll probably be uploaded in anachronic order, so I'll put them up solo rather than as chapters for this work. Please let me know what you thought - my muse took the idea and ran with it. Hope you enjoyed the result!_


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